Hank Greenberg's kid

Any baseball fan with any sense of history knows who Hank Greenberg was. Not Maurice Greenberg, nicknamed Hank, of AIG, whom I've written about here before. I mean the Detroit Tigers slugger Hank Greenberg.

That Greenberg helped make the Tigers the American League champs in both 1934 and 1935 -- his second and third years in the big leagues.

He lost some playing time due to injuries and, like many of his generation, lost years more playing time to the war, serving with distinction in the Air Corps. He was released in the middle of 1945, in time to help the Tigers in the home stretch of the season -- they won the World Series that year, with two WS homes from him.

And so forth. Why do I bring this up in "Proxy Partisans"? Because a story in the WSJ today informs me that Glenn Greenberg, the founder of Chieftain Capital Management Inc., is THAT Greenberg's son. And Chieftain is involved in a proxy fight with Comcast, of which I'll write tomorrow.

Glenn Greenberg's mother is Caral Gimbel, the heiress of an old department store fortune. I'm reminded of the old Christmas movie, "Miracle on 34th Street." A Macy's Santa Claus (who also happens to be the real thing) tells a Mother and son that the toy they want they would be better off buying at Gimbel's than there. "Mr. Macy" is of course initially furious to hear his Santa has done such a thing, but the word-of-mouth on the act of scrupulous honesty rebounds to his store's credit.

Ah ... memories.